This Summer, Vote for Cruciferous Vegetables

You can vote in the marketplace this summer by visiting your local farm stand or farmer’s market.

The bounty from organic (but not certified) local farmers in our rural area has begun. We picked up kale, mustard greens, bok choy, and much more on Monday.

If your goal is to improve your health, cultivate a relationship with a local farmer this summer for same-day-picked nourishment. They work grueling hours in the summer heat and well into the fall, serving the community. If you live in a city and patronage stands at the farmers markets, those farmers will get to know you too.

Our wannabe overlords, such as Bill Gates, have a different future planned for you. Real food is not for you. Your fate will be synthetic meat, insects, or toxic chemical stews with names such as Impossible Burgers.

Many, especially those in more temperate climatic zones, will benefit by increasing consumption of cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, collards, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, mustard greens, bok choy, cauliflower, etc.

Note: Raw cruciferous vegetables such as kale smoothies are not a good idea, they may depress your thyroid function. Steaming or stir-frying cruciferous vegetables is preferred.

The Cleveland Clinic writes, “Cruciferous vegetables are a rich source of compounds known as glucosinolates, which may help fight cancer.”  

Dr. Mark Hyman observes, “The food group that best boosts our detox pathways is the cruciferous vegetable family. This family contains compounds with sulfur that enhance the production of glutathione, the body’s master antioxidant.”

In several of the most lethal chronic diseases, Americans rank among the worst of the developed countries in the world: #1 in diabetes, #2 in Alzheimer’s disease, #5 in cancer, and #6 in cardiovascular disease (CVD).

In the last few decades, as we’ve eschewed proper nutrition in favor of processed food, the incidence of obesity-related cancers (e.g., colon, liver, pancreas, kidney) has continued to grow at annual rates of 2 to 6 percent a year for people in the thirty to fifty age bracket. Processed food (e.g., Doritos and Kit Kats) uniquely feeds cancer growth. Specifically, sugar supplies the backbone for the structural elements that allow the cancer cell to divide and multiply (e.g., lipids, ribose, amino acids) that allow cancer cells to multiply.

Before the advent of packaged and microwavable food, gut bacteria were used to getting what they wanted to eat. But now those same bacteria are starving, and they’re not happy. They are causing the normally impervious intestinal barrier to become “leaky,” leading to inappropriate immune system activation and chronic inflammation.

--Dr. Robert Lustig, Metabolical

Cruciferous vegetables help to reduce the chronic inflammation that Dr. Lustig observes is at the core of many illnesses.

But why not just buy these vegetables from the local supermarket? Food shipped from California might be two weeks old before you buy it in the store.

Conventional industrial agriculture is poisoning our soil and stripping away vital topsoil. Your local farmer is likely engaging in practices that are regenerating the soil. Food picked the same day without pesticides provides more vitality for you.

Ann Tomoko Rosen’s Substack is always an excellent read. Recently, she did us all a great service by transcribing a talk by Dr. Zack Bush.

Dr. Zach Bush connects the dots between chemical farming, our chronic disease crisis and our spiritual crisis

Reading the complete transcription is worth your time, but here are some relevant excerpts from that talk:

If we have a chronic inflammatory epidemic in the world - which is actually a better definition than lots of diseases - then we must be overwhelming the immune systems of all of the public for some reason at the same time…

In the same way that we’ve misunderstood the gut and what gut health means, we’ve misunderstood soil.. and in the early 1900s, really late 1880s, we started to change the way we farmed… we started to disrespect the importance of crop rotation and soil rest, cover cropping… this led to a massive death of the topsoil, which led to the dustbowl which ran through the 1920s and 30s… During the dust bowl we actually for the first time started to outsource our food production…

The Green Revolution was actually use of nitrogen phosphorus potassium or NPK fertilizers. And NPK fertilizer did turn plants green, because nitrogen and phosphorus do that, but what was lacking for the first time in human history was the nutrients and the medicine that should always have been in that food.

And so the plants became weak, just like a human being who lacks nutrients. Their immune system goes down. And when a plant’s immune system goes down it becomes prone to viruses, pests, and it can’t excrete stuff from the root system that would keep weeds at bay. And so now the plants are getting attacked from the outside… And the chemical industry says, “no problem, here’s a new chemical weed killer, here’s a pesticide.”

I am aware that a shift away from industrial agriculture is a transition that will take decades. That process will begin in two ways. Stop subsidizing industrial agriculture, which makes that production method seem cheaper than it is. There is no political will for that change today. But you don’t have to wait. You can vote in the marketplace this summer by visiting your local farm stand or farmers market.

The consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite as it were. They determine who should own and who not, and how much each owner should own.

--Ludwig von Mises, “Profit and Loss”